This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: BBC News
Jan 24, 2012
A rare cast of the death mask of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin has been sold to an anonymous bidder for £3,600 at an auction in Shropshire.The cast was taken in bronze from the original plaster death mask by an art dealer who was visiting Moscow in 1990.Richard Westwood-Brookes, from Church Stretton-based auction house Mullock's, said: "There are, we believe, only two of these in the West."...
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 24, 2012
Tony Blair agreed to a secret deal to hand joint sovereignty of Gibraltar to Spain, according to explosive claims by a former Labour cabinet minister.Peter Hain reveals in his memoirs that he struck the deal with the Spanish government in 2002 to end the UK's 300-year control of the vital strategic outpost.He makes clear that he and Mr Blair were both prepared to ride roughshod over the objections of the people of Gibraltar in order to get their way, describing Mr Blair's attitude to the inhabitants as 'contemptuous'....The former Europe Minister revealed Mr Blair sanctioned the deal because he wanted to win the backing of the Spanish government – then led by Jose Maria Aznar – to help Britain take on France and Germany in EU negotiations.The agreement was only shelved when what he called 'hardliners' in the Spanish government – who wanted only full sovereignty – objected....
Source: AP
Jan 24, 2012
BOSTON – President John F. Kennedy's library is releasing 45 hours of privately recorded meetings and phone calls, providing a window into the final months of his life.The tapes include discussions of conflict in Vietnam, Soviet relations and the race to space, plans for the 1964 Democratic Convention and re-election strategy. There also are moments with his children.On one recording, made days before Kennedy's assassination, he asks staffers to schedule a meeting in a week. He tells them he's booked for the weekend, with no time to meet with an Indonesian general then, either."I'm going to be up at the Cape on Friday, but I'll see him Tuesday," JFK tells staffers....Related LinksABC News Video
Source: BBC News
Jan 24, 2012
The first international drug treaty was signed a century ago this week. So what was the war on drugs like in 1912?Today it is taken for granted that governments will co-operate in the fight against the heroin and cocaine trade.But 100 years ago, narcotics passed from country to country with minimal interference from the authorities. That all changed with the 1912 International Opium Convention, which committed countries to stopping the trade in opium, morphine and cocaine.Then, as now, the US stood in the vanguard against narcotics. While the UK's position is unequivocal today, a century ago it was an unenthusiastic signatory, says Mike Jay, author of Emperors of Dreams: Drugs in the Nineteenth Century.The real concern a century ago was over alcohol, he argues. "There was a big debate over intoxication as there was concern about the heavy, heavy drinking culture of the 19th Century."...
Source: Ynet News
Jan 23, 2012
Historians have cheered news that Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" will be reprinted in Germany for the first time since the Nazi dictator's fall in 1945, just as Holocaust survivors hit out at the move.British publisher Peter McGee said he would put out excerpts from the anti-Semitic manifesto, which laid out the Fuehrer's vision long before he took power in 1933, alongside commentary putting the work in historical contextAcademics said the time had come for some of the taboos surrounding the book in Germany to fall."I think we have a very inhibited approach to this material in Germany. You can read this book around the world – there is even a Hebrew translation in Israel," Journalism Professor Horst Poettker, who is providing some of the annotation for the project, told AFP....
Source: NYT
Jan 23, 2012
LOS ANGELES — No one expects to stumble across a cache of Picasso’s works in the middle of a desert. So who would think that just off bustling Wilshire Boulevard, tucked between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the national headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild, lie buried some of the most exquisitely preserved fossils in the world?The fossils of the La Brea Tar Pits are just that. They were first discovered in Maj. Henry Hancock’s asphalt mine in the 1870s, when Los Angeles was but a village. Since the early 20th century, more than one million bones have been excavated from the pits; when reassembled, they provide an extraordinary time capsule of the creatures that roamed Southern California 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.
Source: NYT
Jan 23, 2012
ISTANBUL — For 1,600 years, this city — Turkey’s largest — has been built and destroyed, erected and erased, as layer upon layer of life has thrived on its seven hills.Today, Istanbul is a city of 13 million, spread far beyond those hills. And on a long-farmed peninsula jutting into Lake Kucukcekmece, 13 miles west of the city center, archaeologists have made an extraordinary find.The find is Bathonea, a substantial harbor town dating from the second century B.C. Discovered in 2007 after a drought lowered the lake’s water table, it has been yielding a trove of relics from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D., a period that parallels Istanbul’s founding and its rise as Constantinople, a seat of power for three successive empires — the Eastern Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman....
Source: NYT
Jan 23, 2012
PARIS — Relations between France and Turkey dipped to a nadir as the French Senate approved a bill late Monday criminalizing the denial of officially recognized genocides, including the Armenian genocide begun in 1915.
Source: Boston Globe
Jan 23, 2012
WASHINGTON—Newt Gingrich called rival Mitt Romney a "terrible historian" but flubbed his own history in Congress on Monday night when he claimed the nation ran four consecutive budget surpluses during his time as House speaker. Romney attacked Gingrich's financial links to Freddie Mac while ignoring his own.------GINGRICH: "When I was speaker, we had four consecutive balanced budgets."THE FACTS: Actually, two.The four straight years of budget surpluses were 1998 through 2001. Gingrich left Congress in 1999, so he only had a hand in surpluses for his last two years. The budget ran deficits for his first two years as speaker.The highest surplus of that four-year string came in budget year 2000, after Gingrich was out of office.Overall, the national debt went up during the four years Gingrich was speaker. In January 1995, when he assumed the leadership position, the gross national debt was $4.8 trillion. When he left four years later, it was $5.6 trillion, an increase of $800 billion....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Jan 23, 2012
Robert F Kennedy feared his children would be blinded by the mafia in an acid attack as revenge attack for investigating them, his widow has revealed.Speaking out for the first time in 30 years, Ethel Kennedy said that her late husband was anxious they would be targeted as retaliation for his probe into mafia racketeering.He saw a report about an American journalist who had been blinded in an acid attack by the mob and feared they would do the same to him.The disclosure will add to conspiracy theories that the mafia may have been responsible for Kennedy’s death.He was shot dead by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968 but speculation has raged that his crusade against the mob whilst serving as U.S. Attorney General may have be the root of his demise....
Source: York Press (UK)
Jan 23, 2012
MEN with Viking surnames filled the meeting room of New Earswick Folk Hall and queued to help research into the ethnic origins of the British people.Academics were collecting DNA from men with Viking names to see if they are directly descended from the Scandanavian traders and seaman who once ruled York and Yorkshire.It was the first of four gatherings across northern England and followed a public appeal for people with Viking surnames to come forward.The project will feature in a future BBC eight-part documentary series on the history of ordinary British people – the Great British Story – and BBC photographers were at the event....
Source: BBC News
Jan 23, 2012
It's exactly 40 years since a Japanese soldier was found in the jungles of Guam, having survived there for nearly three decades after the end of World War II. He was given a hero's welcome on his return to Japan - but never quite felt at home in modern society.For most of the 28 years that Shoichi Yokoi, a lance corporal in the Japanese Army of world War II, was hiding in the jungles of Guam, he firmly believed his former comrades would one day return for him.And even when he was eventually discovered by local hunters on the Pacific island, on 24 January 1972, the 57-year-old former soldier still clung to the notion that his life was in danger."He really panicked," says Omi Hatashin, Yokoi's nephew.Startled by the sight of other humans after so many years on his own, Yokoi tried to grab one of the hunter's rifles, but weakened by years of poor diet, he was no match for the local men....
Source: Washington Times
Jan 23, 2012
Officials in the District are accustomed to asking Congress for full voting rights on behalf of the city’s 600,000 residents or for greater control of city finances - and getting no satisfaction.So when members of Congress proposed the “nationalization” of the District of Columbia World War I Memorial — the only memorial on the Mall exclusively for D.C. veterans — city officials did not jump to support the plan.“The District of Columbia Memorial is for the people of the District of Columbia and it will never be otherwise,” Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting member of Congress, said Monday....
Source: BBC News
Jan 23, 2012
Anti-Jewish feeling is "significantly" entrenched in German society, according to a report by experts appointed by the Bundestag (parliament).They say the internet has played a key role in spreading Holocaust denial, far-right and extreme Islamist views, according to the DPA news agency.They also speak of "a wider acceptance in mainstream society of day-to-day anti-Jewish tirades and actions".The expert group, set up in 2009, is to report regularly on anti-Semitism.The findings of their report, due to be presented on Monday, were that anti-Jewish sentiment was "based on widespread prejudice, deeply-rooted cliches and also on plain ignorance of Jews and Judaism"....
Source: Think Progress
Jan 23, 2012
In 2010, the conservatives who controlled the Texas Board of Education caused an uproar when they made radical changes to the history curriculum for the state’s 4.8 million public school students. The changes included referring to the country’s first black president as “Barack Hussein Obama,” and requiring students to “contrast” Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address with Abraham Lincoln’s philosophical views.To whitewash one of the darkest practices in America history, conservatives proposed that textbooks refer to the slave trade as the “Atlantic triangular trade.”Now Tennessee Tea Party members are taking their efforts a step further and trying to eliminate references to slavery in American history textbooks. Salon reports that Tea Partiers who fetishize America’s founders are “demanding” that students not be taught that many of them owned sla
Source: The Blaze
Jan 23, 2012
There have been many accusations made against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney from conservative opponents, liberals and the media, in regards to his record at Bain, record on abortion, and record on Romneycare.But few have questioned the immigration record of his ancestors.On The Chris Matthews Show Sunday, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell went there:"And looking ahead to the next primary in Florida, 30 percent of the Hispanic community is Cuban-American. That’s a smaller proportion, and so the Hispanic community there is different. And they are less prone to be susceptible to Mitt Romney’s really hard line on immigration, more prone to the Newt Gingrich approach to immigration. The other interesting little fact is about the Mexican Romneys, those looking back at all of those records say that Mitt Romney should look back at the records because the Romneys that came back from Mexico to the United States, they crossed the border illegally."
Source: LiveScience
Jan 23, 2012
A recently discovered mysterious "winged" structure in England, which in the Roman period may have been used as a temple, presents a puzzle for archaeologists, who say the building has no known parallels.Built around 1,800 years ago, the structure was discovered in Norfolk, in eastern England, just to the south of the ancient town of Venta Icenorum. The structure has two wings radiating out from a rectangular room that in turn leads to a central room."Generally speaking, [during] the Roman Empire people built within a fixed repertoire of architectural forms," said William Bowden, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who reported the find in the most recent edition of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. The investigation was carried out in conjunction with the Norfolk Archaeological and Historical Research Group.
Source: Reuters
Jan 23, 2012
KABUL (Reuters) - A cache of ancient Jewish scrolls from northern Afghanistan that has only recently come to light is creating a storm among scholars who say the landmark find could reveal an undiscovered side of medieval Jewry.The 150 or so documents, dated from the 11th century, were found in Afghanistan's Samangan province and most likely smuggled out -- a sorry but common fate for the impoverished and war-torn country's antiquities.Israeli emeritus professor Shaul Shaked, who has examined some of the poems, commercial records and judicial agreements that make up the treasure, said while the existence of ancient Afghan Jewry is known, their culture was still a mystery....
Source: NYT
Jan 23, 2012
Here, along a seamless stretch of small-city blight, a deserted storefront had held its own. With 9 of its 10 front windows broken, it fit in among the two boarded-up bank buildings, last used as houses of worship, and the abandoned Jimmy’s Custom Cleaners, whose claim to being open remained true, since you could stroll right into the emptiness.Finally, a year or two ago, demolition workers knocked down this Highland Avenue building in a municipal act filed somewhere between reclamation and surrender. But in doing so, they uncovered a rare portal to the faraway past, when boys wore knickers and Highland Park was the vibrant home of the Ford Motor Company’s first moving assembly line.The demolition revealed two colorful, well-preserved advertisements that had adorned the brick side of the adjacent building for nearly a century. Their two-story assumptions of endless prosperity are particularly conspicuous in the Highland Park of today, a city so economically distressed that it recently removed most of its streetlights.
Source: Columbus Dispatch
Jan 22, 2012
When friends ask me what’s new at work, I occasionally (often enough to become tiresome) respond with, 'Nothing. Everything I work with is old.'But that’s not entirely true. In archaeology, as in any field of science, there is always something new — whether it’s a new discovery or the development of new technologies that enable us to learn new things about old discoveries.Ohio’s ancient earthworks certainly aren’t news. The Smithsonian Institution’s first publication, in 1848, included surveys of most of the largest sites.Sadly, since then, many of these wonderful sites have been plowed over or leveled to make way for houses, stores and factories. For example, the authors of the Smithsonian report concluded, with regard to Newark’s once-sprawling earthworks, “The ancient lines can now be traced only at intervals, among gardens and outhouses.”...
